April 08, 2013

tl;dr [by John Beer]

This is perhaps my favorite piece of conceptual writing.

***

Over the weekend I found myself in the judges' room for a
high school Speech & Debate final (true story!). I asked one of the English
teachers there whether poetry was a hard sell to her students, thinking I
suppose of the oft-stated consensus that of all the genres poetry's the most
resistant, the least popular, the swath of the textbook one rushes past to get
to the plotty parts. "Not at all," she said, whether because they
thrive on its intensity or simply through their tech- & hip-hop-enabled
comfort with compression and linguistic multifariousness. “The problem is
novels. It’s very hard to convince them that reading anything lengthy is
worthwhile.”

***

What the villagers call that empty space of weeds, that
grove or knoll where my mother was baptized. Not __________, but ___________.

Not церква but коcтьол, kościół, the word in the banished
tongue.

Shibboleth? [can’t
hear you.]

Ear of corn? [can’t
make out the word.]

She coughs. The body’s own water pools in the crevice of her
clavicle. The wind ripples the lake so shallow now that no fish can winter
there.

In addition to writing some of the most singular books of
poetry of the last decade (2002’s O
Cidadán, 2009’s Expeditions of a
Chimaera with Oana Avasilichioaei, 2010’s O Resplandor, among others), Moure has published translations of
the equally uncategorizable Galician poet Chus Pato, as well as a brilliant
translation/reimagination of O Guardador
de Rebanhos by Fernando Pessoa, or by his heteronym Alberto Caeiro. Pessoa
famously recalibrated the task of the poet as the creation of personae rather
than poems, conjuring the myriad personalities who then undertook the labor of
drafting the writings associated with his name.

Moure gives the adventure of Pessoan heteronymity a
political and sociolinguistic spin; as the above passage suggests, her work
crosses and recrosses geographic and linguistic boundaries as it details its
author’s encounters with real and imagined figures and events. Pato figures
tangentially as a correspondent, while more central is the elusive Elisa
Sampedrin, an authorial alter ego who appeared previously in O Resplandor. Sampedrin reflects upon
Moure as Moure reflects upon the dark history that sent her own mother from the
Ukraine to Canada in the first half of the last century.

Naturally enough, both Moure’s champions and her detractors
tend to frame her work in relation to the post-structuralist theory that has
informed avant-garde writing for almost two generations now. One will encounter
citations of Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Agamben in her writing, and the
passage above with its fragmentation and erasures invites assimilation to the
familiar gestures of language and post-language writing.

But the heteronym is both an anticipation of and a deviation
from the vertiginous deconstructions of later theory. Pessoa’s writings offer
us a vision of identity plural and dispersed, circulating through the
linguistic productions of a system of personae. But through imaginative
investment the counterfeit becomes real, accruing an undeniable particularity.
In Moure’s work, as well, the destabilization of identities and unsettling of
comfortable reading habits goes hand-in-hand with the production of new and exhilarating
reading possibilities, generated out of the incessant layering of linguistic
strata, and thereby new existential possibilities. As Johanna Skibsrud puts it
in an unusually perceptive reading of Moure, “hers is not an interest in
language as a fact in itself..equally her intention is not to arrive at a sense
of greater senselessness. Moure’s poetry is instead interested precisely in the
‘explosivity across membranes’ that E.S. represents in The Unmemntioable.”

What Moure’s work seems to call out for (and what Skibsrud’s
reading to some degree attains) is a criticism that can trace out its processes
of destabilization and reconfiguration. In particular, her writing manifests a
kind of self-consciousness often associated with the “metafictional,” but which
is intensified and qualitatively altered through the medium of lyric, as well
as via her text’s multilingual slippages. So much of contemporary writing is
sick with knowingness; Moure’s signal achievement is to parry the inescapable
reflexivity of her poetry with a countervailing urge to unknowing.

***

This fall, Wave Books will publish the collection Poems (1962-1997) by Robert Lax, which I
edited. Among other pieces, the book contains the entirety of Lax’s 1962
collection New Poems, which I consider
one of the underread gems of 20th-century American poetry. Here’s
one poem from that collection:

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

How do you read
a poem like this? How do you know when you’re finished with it?

One’s inner cynic might answer that it’s pretty easy to
read, and even easier to be finished with. (Criticism often seems to launch
from the premise that the poem is guilty until proven innocent, as though never
being taken in is the highest virtue.)

“My kid could do that,” is the old and shamelessly
philistine way of attacking art that dispenses with traditional conventions;
variations on it persist in museums and journals to this day. To which Lax’s
longtime friend Ad Reinhardt would respond, “Your kid must be a genius!” &
he or she probably is.

Comments

tl;dr [by John Beer]

This is perhaps my favorite piece of conceptual writing.

***

Over the weekend I found myself in the judges' room for a
high school Speech & Debate final (true story!). I asked one of the English
teachers there whether poetry was a hard sell to her students, thinking I
suppose of the oft-stated consensus that of all the genres poetry's the most
resistant, the least popular, the swath of the textbook one rushes past to get
to the plotty parts. "Not at all," she said, whether because they
thrive on its intensity or simply through their tech- & hip-hop-enabled
comfort with compression and linguistic multifariousness. “The problem is
novels. It’s very hard to convince them that reading anything lengthy is
worthwhile.”

***

What the villagers call that empty space of weeds, that
grove or knoll where my mother was baptized. Not __________, but ___________.

Not церква but коcтьол, kościół, the word in the banished
tongue.

Shibboleth? [can’t
hear you.]

Ear of corn? [can’t
make out the word.]

She coughs. The body’s own water pools in the crevice of her
clavicle. The wind ripples the lake so shallow now that no fish can winter
there.

In addition to writing some of the most singular books of
poetry of the last decade (2002’s O
Cidadán, 2009’s Expeditions of a
Chimaera with Oana Avasilichioaei, 2010’s O Resplandor, among others), Moure has published translations of
the equally uncategorizable Galician poet Chus Pato, as well as a brilliant
translation/reimagination of O Guardador
de Rebanhos by Fernando Pessoa, or by his heteronym Alberto Caeiro. Pessoa
famously recalibrated the task of the poet as the creation of personae rather
than poems, conjuring the myriad personalities who then undertook the labor of
drafting the writings associated with his name.

Moure gives the adventure of Pessoan heteronymity a
political and sociolinguistic spin; as the above passage suggests, her work
crosses and recrosses geographic and linguistic boundaries as it details its
author’s encounters with real and imagined figures and events. Pato figures
tangentially as a correspondent, while more central is the elusive Elisa
Sampedrin, an authorial alter ego who appeared previously in O Resplandor. Sampedrin reflects upon
Moure as Moure reflects upon the dark history that sent her own mother from the
Ukraine to Canada in the first half of the last century.

Naturally enough, both Moure’s champions and her detractors
tend to frame her work in relation to the post-structuralist theory that has
informed avant-garde writing for almost two generations now. One will encounter
citations of Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Agamben in her writing, and the
passage above with its fragmentation and erasures invites assimilation to the
familiar gestures of language and post-language writing.

But the heteronym is both an anticipation of and a deviation
from the vertiginous deconstructions of later theory. Pessoa’s writings offer
us a vision of identity plural and dispersed, circulating through the
linguistic productions of a system of personae. But through imaginative
investment the counterfeit becomes real, accruing an undeniable particularity.
In Moure’s work, as well, the destabilization of identities and unsettling of
comfortable reading habits goes hand-in-hand with the production of new and exhilarating
reading possibilities, generated out of the incessant layering of linguistic
strata, and thereby new existential possibilities. As Johanna Skibsrud puts it
in an unusually perceptive reading of Moure, “hers is not an interest in
language as a fact in itself..equally her intention is not to arrive at a sense
of greater senselessness. Moure’s poetry is instead interested precisely in the
‘explosivity across membranes’ that E.S. represents in The Unmemntioable.”

What Moure’s work seems to call out for (and what Skibsrud’s
reading to some degree attains) is a criticism that can trace out its processes
of destabilization and reconfiguration. In particular, her writing manifests a
kind of self-consciousness often associated with the “metafictional,” but which
is intensified and qualitatively altered through the medium of lyric, as well
as via her text’s multilingual slippages. So much of contemporary writing is
sick with knowingness; Moure’s signal achievement is to parry the inescapable
reflexivity of her poetry with a countervailing urge to unknowing.

***

This fall, Wave Books will publish the collection Poems (1962-1997) by Robert Lax, which I
edited. Among other pieces, the book contains the entirety of Lax’s 1962
collection New Poems, which I consider
one of the underread gems of 20th-century American poetry. Here’s
one poem from that collection:

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

How do you read
a poem like this? How do you know when you’re finished with it?

One’s inner cynic might answer that it’s pretty easy to
read, and even easier to be finished with. (Criticism often seems to launch
from the premise that the poem is guilty until proven innocent, as though never
being taken in is the highest virtue.)

“My kid could do that,” is the old and shamelessly
philistine way of attacking art that dispenses with traditional conventions;
variations on it persist in museums and journals to this day. To which Lax’s
longtime friend Ad Reinhardt would respond, “Your kid must be a genius!” &
he or she probably is.